Category Archives: about childhood things

I just read a WONDERFUL article written by the type of person who really should be the ruler the universe. If everyone had the same kind of attitude as this woman does, then this world would be far more tolerant and a rad place to live. Hence my title. Of course, I think MY mum is the best mum ever, which is to be expected (but seriously, she is) so this woman could be like, my mum’s High Chancellor or Advisory Queen or something.

These guys were So Fun. We kept them in empty icecream tubs. And then we discovered they made GLITTER Hama Beads! And GLOW IN THE DARK Hama Beads! Was there any end to the fun? Well, yes:

1. When you really, really, really needed just one more purple glitter bead to finish off your art piece extravaganza and you realise you’ve already ironed on the last purple glitter bead on to another art piece extravaganza. So you think just using plain purple will work. But it doesn’t. So then you accidentally on purpose destroy the other art piece extravaganza to use one of the purple glitter beads on your new art piece extravaganza but it’s all melty and not the same.

2. When you step on them.

3. When you’ve spent hours putting your beads on the board and then you accidentally knock the table and they all jump out of place.

4. When you drop your entire bucket of Hama Beads on the floor. You will be finding them for weeks.

5. When you finally finish a masterpiece and you get out the baking paper to iron it to make it all melty and stuck together and you get too excited so start peeling the baking paper off far too early and half the beads come off with the paper and the other half are still on the board.

I’m having so much fun with my new scanner that I would be scanning my wallpaper if I had wallpaper which I don’t.

So instead I’ve scanned all the coloured plates from my favourite book in the world, The Enchanted Forest by Ida Rentoul Outhwaite. This book was given to me by my Grandma and she got when she was 5 years old in 1921. It’s an Australian fairy story and one of those things I would save if my house was on fire and I could only pick three things.*

Here are some of the very beautiful pictures for your joy and fun. Some are a bit wonky because it is very hard to scan a book that is nearly 100 years old and is one thread from falling completely apart.

So uploading those just took away about a squillion years of my life. They were very big files.

* The other two things would be a) my boat. Not an actual boat, a model of a boat that has sails and looks like it should be in the study of the professor from the Narnia books. My b) thing would probably be my bear Snowy. Who would actually be my number 1 thing. Snowy would get saved before any small children or animals, if they were unlucky enough to be in my burning inferno of a house.

Yeah, that’s right, GRADE THREE! A friend of mine is a primary school teacher and was correcting workbooks when she came across that gem of a sentence and shared it with me. Beautiful.

I am stunted by the genius of a grade three boy. So I think it’s best if I just smoke a cigarette, eat a chocolate teddy bear biscuit, smoke a cigarette, and go to bed. In that order.

And yes, I did mean to write ‘smoke a cigarette’ twice.

***

This post was orginally a little longer. There was a lengthy paragraph exclusively about the correct use of grammar, and inviting readers to answer my grammar queary.

My sister commented. THE ANSWER WAS SO OBVIOUS THAT I COULDN’T KEEP MY QUESTION UP IN THE PUBLIC EYE. It was too, too humiliating. At first I thought I would publically put my hands up and say yes, look how silly I am, laugh with me! But there would be no laughing with me. There would be a lot of laughing at me. And so it had to go, and the comment with it.

So I would like to give a shout out to my sister for proving that you can dye your hair as much as you want. But once a blonde, always a blonde.

I just bought a really pretty new printer/scanner and I’ve been having lots of fun scanning my vintage paper dollies. These were given to me by my mother when I was little, and they were given to her by her godmother when she was little. And then my mother’s godmother got them when she was a little girl way back when.

Way back when was when my Grandma was also a little girl so that would have been in the 1920s. I might put the Wikipedia thingy here [cite needed] cos I don’t actually know when my mother’s godmother got them. Let’s just say the ’20s for the sake of it and my mother can confirm this at a later time.

So these dollies have been played with for something like 90 years or thereabouts, and I must say that three generations of little girls have taken pretty spectacular care of them.

Here are some of them for your viewing pleasure. (They really are very pretty and fun.)